Individuals, businesses, and other entities rely heavily on the Internet for communication and information access. The Internet provides the ability to access information from a wide variety of resources and to communicate instantaneously with as few or as many people as one likes. While these abilities are very useful to users, users' interactions with one another and their consumption of data are also very interesting to others, such as market analysts. Analysts can learn many things about users based on the nature of their communications and the information they consume and then use this analysis to shape marketing strategies, consumer products, etc.
The Internet provides many different means through which users can communicate with one another, including email, forums, blogs, instant messaging (IM), and social networks. And each of these different means of communication may suit different purposes or allow users to communicate with a different audience. For example, instant messaging is more likely to be used by a user to communicate with one other user or a small group of users, while social networks may be used to communicate with one user (e.g., a direct message), all friends or acquaintances of a user (e.g., a post to a user's private network), or the general public (e.g., a post to a public social network). Moreover, some forms of Internet communication, such as blogs and social networks, allow users to view relationships and communications among other users, such as messages exchanged between users and relationships between users (e.g., friendships, connections, following/followed relationships).
The large volume of data available regarding Internet users' communications and data consumption may be difficult or, in most cases, impossible for analysts to digest. For example, an analyst may have access to information regarding a user's relationships, communications, and interests. In view of the volume of this information and the rate at which the body of this information grows, an analyst would be unable to process that information even with significant expenditure of manual analysis. Therefore, improved systems and methods are desired that provide more efficient visualization, manipulation, and export of data regarding users' Internet communications, while addressing one or more of the above drawbacks and disadvantages.